OECD Guidelines on Measuring Subjective Well-being (2025 Update)

The OECD regularly produces guidelines to advance the measurement of concepts that are crucial to the well-being of people the planet and future generations. In 2013 the OECD published the first edition of the OECD Guidelines on Measuring Subjective Well-being to improve the quality and international comparability of subjective well-being data by providing explicit recommendations on question wording survey design and methodological good practice. Subjective well-being encompasses the ways that people experience and think about their lives. These data serve as an important complement to objective measures of economic and social progress and can yield policy-relevant insights when collected and analysed in a rigorous manner. The updated 2025 edition builds on the recommendations put forth in the first edition and provides interested data producers with the information and tools they need to measure subjective well-being in a robust well-validated and internationally comparable way. The resulting guidelines introduce three key changes: (1) a shortened core module of three priority subjective well-being measures (2) streamlined extended modules for each component of subjective well-being and (3) a new cross-cutting experimental module for data producers interested in expanding their coverage of subjective well-being concepts that have thus far been under-measured.